Graphic Novels

 Maybe some would look down on graphic novels, perhaps seeing them as a sign of the decline in educational standards. Picture books! But I've had a few chats with customers at Oxfam and there seems to be an avid readership who enjoy the quality of the graphics, even collecting books by a particular illustrator.

I have a few on my Kindle and the ebook versions are remarkably good, being able to progress the story simply by tapping the image on screen, bringing up the next image in line. And each image can be enlarged by zooming in.

Until recently the best I had was "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas", the novel by Hunter S Thompson, illustrated and adapted by Troy Little. The graphics perfectly matched the hallucinogenic story of two guys chasing the "american dream". But a week or so ago I saw a graphic version of Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse 5" , a book I have always intended to read but have never got around to. One small section of the novel I was aware of was where a bombing raid during WW2 was described in reverse order, with the tragic dismemberment of human beings, blown to pieces, is transposed backwards - the people coming back together, the bombs reassembling, going back into the bomb bays, the bombers returning home, the crews returning to being new born babes, the weaponry being unassembled and every part returning to the ground from which it came, once more a part of nature.

This passage had always stayed in my mind but as said, I had never read the whole book. When I saw the graphic edition on Kindle I downloaded a sample for free but balked at the asking price of £13.99. But scanning the sample again I saw "Purchase now at £0.79p". Error or not I tapped to purchase and sure enough was only charged 79p!

I have been reading the book on and off for a few days now. Really excellent, the illustrations quite simple yet they very much complement the balloon bubbles of the text.

The novel revolves around the terrible bombing of Dresden during WW2, when overnight 25,000 civilians died, burnt/blown to bits. The author, Kurt Vonnegut, was actually there, and survived. In the US army, he had been captured by the Germans in 1943 and eventually taken to Dresden where he, and others, were put to work in a slaughterhouse - the Slaughterhouse 5 of the title. Obviously he survived, along with others and four German guards. Coming out of the slaughterhouse (the irony.....) they found and witnessed the devastation around them. Reading between the lines, the experience defined Kurt Vonnegut's life and maybe writing the novel was a way of "coming to terms" with it - if such is possible.

There is a dimension of "non-linear" time throughout the whole story - in line with the excerpt I mentioned before. All events are co-eternal, existing all at once. And yet, necessarily separated and put into sequence by our human experience of a "self". Much to remind me of Dogen, who speaks of firewood and ash, explaining in Dogenese that the ash is not the future of the firewood, nor does the firewood become the ash. Each has their own singular "dharma" moment which must be actualised. ("Genjokoan" - in Japanese, the "actualisation of reality" beyond concepts)

Digressing even more, Dogen takes exception to the oft quoted "emptiness is form and form is emptiness" of Mahayana Buddhism. As Dogen saw it, such is simply conceptual. Reality is not "actualised". Dogen insisted that "form is form" and "emptiness is emptiness"- emptiness is there in form, form is there in emptiness. OK, all gobbledygook no doubt, yet "we are what we understand". But words are words - reality is reality. Actualised or not.

Make of that what you will, but getting back to "Slaughterhouse 5", I can certainly recommend the novel. Good graphics and in parts deeply moving - as people despoiled by events, corrupted, can be known in a totally true/real "dharma moment" as a new-born.

As the Good Book says:- "And a little child shall lead them".

I have faith that it can be so.

May true Dharma continue.

No blame. Be kind. Love everything.